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If you've got trouble understanding what women find patronizing about binders, then you've got blinders about the status of women in modern America as bread-winners. Taking the patronizing comments one by one:

1."I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible."

The "if" is the poison in this sentence. IF you're going to have women in the workplace? Women make up a majority of the workplace in America and more and more are the breadwinners for middle class households. Does Romney not know this?

2. [My chief of staff] said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 p.m. at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 p.m. so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine.

Yes, this is the difficulty facing many American families, mixing two income households with the pleasures and responsibilities of raising children. Notwithstanding the sexism inherent in the making dinners note (Romney put those words in the mouth of his female chief of staff), the last sentence is what rankles women voters: "So we said fine." Fine? As in gladly? Or, as in if you must? As in grudging yes. That's how women here...fine! If you insist.

3. The story is untrue. Romney's ordering the binders is a lie - and it demonstrates how well he lies and how often and why, in order to aggrandize himself. This time, he came off as Lord of the Manor not savvy businessman or enlightened governor. The Boston Phoenix reports that it was women's groups in Massachusetts that prepared lists of qualified women for whomever won the 2002 gubernatorial race. Because it was Romney, he was presented with - presented with not ordered - the lists. None of these women were appointed to top cabinet posts. Most left the administration within four years. Then there's this: his record at Bain was worse: No women partners during his ownership of the company. Want to know how Romney thinks about women? Look at his record. It's a bad record. And women's issues - from workplace fairness, pay fairness, and contraception fairness to a women's right to choose - will always take a backseat to other issues in a Romney administration. There are no other issues that don't include women's issues.

What was clear in the binders phrase is that Romney stills sees women as homemakers before he sees them as breadwinners. The notion of 'binders of women' suggests clearly that to Romney women are just un-people, that in his unconscious mind, he can't find any as female peers without binders, can't find any female professionals without binders. Instead, he only respects white extremely wealthy men. As President Obama says of himself, he doesn't need any binders to find qualified working women. Not convinced? Just as Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. He didn't find them in binders. He finds them in his everyday professional experience the way most Americans do. And this is why women are turning away from Romney down the stretch. He just doesn't get it.

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